Weekly Wrestling Quiz: Mergers And Acquisitions

Wrestling News World has teamed up with The Armpit to offer fun and interactive wrestling quizzes. This week's installment is below:

Welcome to The Armpit wrestling quiz for the week of October 3, 2016.

As of this writing, TNA is still up for sale. While WWE looks less likely as a potential buyer, it’s not out of the question. In case it does happen, the theme of this week’s quiz is “Mergers and Acquisitions.”

I’m sensing that many of you reading these quizzes now are younger than the people reading them when I did these quizzes 10 years ago, so some of the questions may be before your time. We’ll start focusing on more questions from the Attitude era and beyond, and if we ask about the ‘80s (such as this week), the questions will be easier than before.

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Congratulations to last week’s winner: Thom O’Keefe.

Last week’s answers:

1) When WCW brought back the cruiserweight division in 1996, it was Shinjiro Otani who beat Chris Benoit to become the first champion.

2) At Halloween Havoc ’97, Eddie Guerrero lost the title to Rey Mysterio Jr.

3) Two women who held the cruiserweight title in the horrible Vince Russo era were Madusa and Daffney. I used to have such a crush on Daffney.

4) When the WWF took over the cruiserweight title following their purchase of WCW, one of the early female champions was Jacqueline.

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5) The last WWE cruiserweight champion was Hornswoggle. Apologies for my hint, which stated “she” was recently inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. Obviously that hint was supposed to be for question #4, not question #5.

This week’s questions:

1. The WWF’s national expansion, which began in 1984 with Hulk Hogan as Vince McMahon’s dominant star, forced most of the American territories to crumble. Two of his major competitors ended up merging in 1987, when Jim Crockett Promotions (the NWA) purchased which other territory?

2. Just over a year later, Crockett entered into negotiations with Ted Turner and TBS. The ink dried in late 1988 and the NWA was officially sold to Turner just before Starrcade ’88. On that excellent PPV show, Ric Flair defended the NWA title against whom? (Trivia note: it was originally supposed to be Rick Steiner)

3. The NWA rebranded itself as WCW in 1990, and struggled financially for years until the Nitro era. But bad booking in 1999, combined with the WWF’s comeback on the backs of Steve Austin and later the Rock, forced WCW out of business. Just before WWE bought WCW for dirt cheap, Eric Bischoff found a company to buy it first. What was the name of that company?

4. The WWF was considering buying a major MMA promotion around that same time, which Shane McMahon was pushing heavily for. It ended up not happening, which they probably regret. Which MMA promotion, which is very much still around today, did Shane McMahon want the WWF to buy?

5. Vince McMahon has a great track record in pro wrestling, but not so much in other business ventures (movies, bodybuilding, etc). His biggest failure was the colossal flop that was the XFL. Luckily a major television network had partnered with them, so they shared the enormous losses with them. Which TV network co-owned the XFL with the WWF?

Please email your answers to Quiz@armpit-wrestling.com. On the weekend we will randomly generate a number to determine the winner. For example, if the number is 25 and you’re the 25th person to email us with correct answers, you win. We’ll announce your name here next week, along with anything you’d like to promote (assuming it’s not X-rated or illegal). It could be your name, blog, Twitter handle, or anything else you’d like us to mention.